Now after reading Chapter's 4,6,9 in Will Richardson's Blog's, Wiki's, Podcasts and other Powerful Web Tools for Classroom I have many of the concerns that Richardson talked about in the book. My main concern is with the fact that in so many schools the focus is on privacy and with the younger students with the idea of keeping them away from online predators and information that is not appropriate for them.
Though I see many of the benefits that both these tools can bring I am not sure I see uses in the primary grade level. I see how using this tool allows them to collaborate with many different people across the globe to help define certain areas of interest. However, knowing the population that I work with at my school I can see many parents putting up a huge stink about their child posting things on the web. It was hard to convince even my principal about the idea of blogs due to this and she has told me that if parents complain or raise any concern she is taking the blogs down.
I would love to use these tools and the benefits I feel would be astronomical for my students in helping them develop more advanced, detailed writing I do not see anyway around the many issues that surround my principal and parents in my county. Does anyone have any suggestions of how I could get around this issue and/or convince the people in my county of the benefits of using these tools?
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Our ITSopedia wiki is password protected. Perhaps you could use it within your own school (either other classes your grade or across grades) and make it private to the school. Or, if you want them to get the experience of talking to a completely different set of students, I wonder if there is a place you can go to find other teachers with the same idea. Like keypal, you could partner with them to create a wiki - and keep the privacy by only including your classes.
ReplyDeleteI too am a bit lost on how to use wikis with the primary grades. I teach 2nd grade. I also think that the parents at my school would be weary about the postings online. I had 4 parents not allow their child's photo to be sent to their pen-pal via mail in England!
ReplyDeleteSpotsy has a website just for individual classrooms where we can do all kinds of online publishing and cooperative work. There might be something wiki-like on there, I should check into that.
Yes here in Stafford we have our individual pages on SchoolFusion, but we can't put anything on it that allows for collaboration. Now I had to setup a whole different profile in order to just have my students post blogs, then create login's/passwords for each child. Now given my kids are going to benefit from doing them, but I can see where some teachers might be turned off by this idea. It just might be a Stafford County thing, but that goes into what we are talking about in our Tech. Leadership course about being reflective.
ReplyDeleteThats a good idea though Karilee about the school wiki's or keypal and I will have to look into it. We just need to find a way to show the parents the benefits, so that they would be more open to the idea, any suggestions?